Music Theory and the Epistemology of the Internet; Or, Analyzing Music Under the New Thinkpiece Regime William O’Hara (Gettysburg College)
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Music Theory and the Epistemology of the Internet; or, Analyzing Music Under the New Thinkpiece Regime William O’Hara (Gettysburg College) Published in August 2018 in Analitica: Rivista online di studi musicali 10 (2018). See: www.gatm.it/analiticaojs/index.php/analitica/article/view/184/156 Over the past twenty-five years, the growth of the internet has completely transformed journalism and media. “The relationship between new media and journalism,” write Eugenia Siapera and Andreas Veglis, “has become a close embrace to the point where it is difficult to imagine an exclusively offline journalism” (Siapara and Vegler 2012, 1). This relationship has not only seen existing publications—from traditional newspapers like The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, and Der Spiegel to magazines like The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, and The London Review of Books—move partially or completely online; it has also seen the rapid rise of online-only publications. Some of these digital platforms (such as Slate, The Daily Beast, The Huffington Post, and so forth) mirror the structure of print media. Others take new, born-digital forms, often oriented around specific approaches to culture or current events. FiveThirtyEight, for example—deriving its name from the number of electoral votes contested in each American presidential election—analyzes politics, economics, culture, and sports from a statistical perspective. Vox (with its tagline, “Understand the News”) focuses on providing context for current events, producing simple explanations of complex global and cultural phenomena, which it calls “Explainers.” Still more publications cater to specific audiences of hobbyists or enthusiasts, reporting on topics from entertainment and gossip, to aviation, to business, to video games, to music, interior design, and fashion. Many online media companies (including Vice and Vox) run multiple “verticals”: sub-websites devoted to specific topics of interest (from food and fashion to video games and real estate), hoping to compete with the many specialist websites and publications that now populate the internet. In addition to current events and commentary, many of the above publications devote substantial space to reporting on and analyzing popular culture, from music, to television and film, to comic books. And over the past few years, an increasing number of essays have appeared that appeal to music theory in particular as a grounding device. With two-part titles like “Skin Tight Jeans and Syncopation: Explaining the Genius of Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream—Using Music Theory” (Pallett 2014a) and “Ecstatic Melodic Copulation: Explaining the Genius of Daft Punk’s ‘Get Lucky’ Using Music Theory” (Pallett 2014b), these essays sound almost as if they might be academic papers. But while these general-interest music theory essays have mastered the art of the enticing pre-colon hook, the present essay is more concerned with the second half of these titles: using music theory. By simultaneously instrumentalizing music theory as a purely analytical tool, and treating it as if it were a unified body of knowledge, essays like these cast music theory as a secret decoder ring that is arcane and mysterious, and yet scientifically rigorous: the equivalent, so these titles argue, of the statistics that drive websites like FiveThirtyEight. This paper will explore the epistemological conditions under which both web-based subgenres like Vox’s “Explainers,” and a distinct strain of popular print non-fiction by authors like Malcolm Gladwell, Jonah Lehrer, Steven Pinker, and others, have risen to prominence over the past decade. Those conditions, I will argue, have given rise to a wave of general-interest music theory, propagated 2 mostly online. Such writings offer fascinating reflections upon music theory as it is practiced in the academy, particularly with regard to the growing pains and disciplinary debates of recent decades, and the growing movement within both musicology and theory to engage with non-specialist audiences via practices from the digital humanities and public humanities. While this essay focuses primarily on English-language websites and the articles they publish, I hope it proves a productive starting point for further research on music theory in general interest publications in other languages. The Tree of Knowledge In a certain genre of early-twenty-first century non-fiction writing, nearly every phenomenon is the province of secret knowledge. Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (2005) is perhaps the perfect encapsulation of the prevailing epistemology of both the New York Times non-fiction best-seller list, and of many contemporary general interest publications on the internet. Written by University of Chicago economist Steven D. Levitt and journalist Stephen J. Dubner, Freakonomics features a series of case studies that apply economic research and theory to societal issues from real estate prices to children’s names, from the ethics of cheating in Sumo wrestling to the illicit drug trade. The book’s title is emblematic of an entire subgenre of contemporary nonfiction: it posits that everything has a “hidden side,” a secret explanation waiting to be exposed to the public by someone who is in the know. Implicitly, economics is the tool with which such secrets are revealed. “What this book is about,” its authors write in their introduction, “is stripping a layer or two from the surface of modern life and seeing what is happening underneath” (Levitt and Dubner 2005, 10). Although economics is posed here as a kind of master discipline (or at least meta-discipline, able to model vast swaths of human experience and behavior), the book’s subtitle also hints that the knowledge it contains is forbidden—that applying the analytical tools of economics outside of their native realm of balance sheets and commodity prices is somehow naughty. Steven Levitt is presented as a “rogue economist” whose willingness to step outside of his discipline’s traditional domains—or perhaps simply his willingness to address the general public—makes him a black sheep.1 The hidden knowledge he promises is presented as being somehow illicit: the book’s cover image—featuring an apple that has been sliced open to reveal the citrusy matrix of an orange beneath—not only makes the book’s argument about “hidden sides” in visual form; it invokes the forbidden fruit of Biblical lore. Levitt proffers illicit enlightenment, while with a wink and a nod implying that in so doing, he risks expulsion from his Edenic ivory tower. Freakonomics’ focus on overlooked connections and counterintuitive results exemplifies a trend that has been growing since the mid-2000s. New York Times writer Rachel Donadio cites Malcolm Gladwell, Steven B. Johnson, and James Surowiecki as additional participants in this “highly contagious hybrid genre of nonfiction, one that takes a nonthreatening and counterintuitive look at pop culture and the mysteries of the everyday” (Donadio 2006).2 A survey of titles cited by Donadio is instructive: they are full of surprising juxtapositions and inversions: Everything Bad is Good for You (Johnson 2005); How Little Things Make a Big Difference (Gladwell 2000); Why the Many are Smarter Than the Few (Surowiecki 2004). And commercial nonfiction’s trend toward novel and counterintuitive analyses of sociological and cultural phenomena is not only found in print: it spills over to the internet as well. The websites named above publish dozens of short essays per week, focusing on analysis, commentary, or 3 contextualization. These essays have come to be known, colloquially, as “thinkpieces.” The word “thinkpiece” is not a new coinage; the Oxford English Dictionary traces it to a December 1935 issue of Harper’s magazine, and describes it simply as “an article containing discussion, analysis, or opinion, as opposed to facts or news.” Thinkpieces have been found in print magazines throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and with the advent of the internet, have moved online. In recent years, the word has taken on a distinctly negative connotation: in common parlance, “thinkpiece” is now most often an ironic or self-deprecating label for a piece of short-form writing about media or current events (Haglund 2014). Another, less negatively valenced term for this online form might be the “blessay”: a portmanteau of “blog” and “essay.” As described by historian Dan Cohen, several qualities of the blessay describe the kinds of writing with which this article is concerned. It is “a manifestation of the convergence of journalism and scholarship in mid-length forms online.” The blessay is frequently “informed by academic knowledge and analysis, but doesn’t rub [the reader’s] nose in it” (Cohen 2013). To their proponents, then, online thinkpieces productively blend the formal writing—and by extension, formal setting—of academia with accessibility, flexibility, and speed. To their critics, online thinkpieces do not add constructively do discourse, instead drawing attention and gaining readers by presenting sensational, surprising, or controversial ideas or opinions. From a more cynical perspective, then, such essays in online venues are sometimes called “hot takes” or “takes,” again in a deprecating manner, which draws attention to their reliance on provocative opinions or counterintuitive analyses. John Hermann describes internet “takes” as a “newsy glossolalia,” a spilling forth of opinions held only for their own sake: “the internet’s evolutionary defense against attention surplus” (Hermann 2014). And within the economy of the internet, which rewards sheer numbers of readers and statistically legible engagement such as comments or social media posts, surplus attention represents a significant source of income for most digital journalism outlets. There is thus great demand for “clickbait”: concise, timely, and easily sharable content, which many critics deride as having little redeeming quality other than virality. “Online media is so ruthlessly click-driven,” writes Nathan J. Robinson, that it’s almost impossible to break free of the existing forms. After all, they do precisely what they’re supposed to do.